Miklós Bánffy - They Were Found Wanting

Balint was not at all sorry. As it turned out it was a lucky chance that the operation had still proved fruitless even after he had accepted the notary’s offer of help. Although they were quite within the law to ask for the gendarmes the fact that Simo had himself offered them showed that the notary found himself under an obligation to someone, and by playing this double game and making sure that the trick did not come off he was clearly repaying a debt and was now free of it. But in doing so it was he himself who broke the thin thread of any confidence Abady might still have had in him.

I wonder why he did it, mused Balint. Why should he betray the plan he himself had suggested?

There were several possibilities. The offer of help might have been made simply to curry favour with the powerful landowner; Simo was quite adept at this as Balint had seen when he was setting up the co-operative in the mountains. But any display of goodwill coming from him was sure to be false; he hated Abady’s strict management of the forests where the new order had put an end to the illicit deer shoots that he had had with the old and now retired manager Nyiresy. When that old rogue had still been the Abady forest manager they had lived like lords themselves, organizing wild festivities, getting free wood for themselves and others, while ignoring all restraints of law and order. Now Abady had put an end to his life as a little tin god in the mountains and he couldn’t forgive him. Of course there were probably other reasons too, more serious ones that he hardly dared speak of. No doubt, after the shooting and other incidents he was frightened that the mountain people would try to take their revenge on him for helping the money-lenders and the foreclosures. Perhaps, as the whole village was involved in the matter of the illegal grazing, he had felt it wiser to prove he wasn’t totally against them and perhaps felt he would breathe more easily as he went about his business if he did them a good turn for once.

This at least was Abady’s train of thought. Still, he realized that he had not yet found the answer to the cattle problem. Something else would have to be tried. Perhaps he could go straight to the Prefect of the district and get gendarmes from somewhere not under Simo’s jurisdiction. Maybe that would be the answer …

THE CHURCH BELLS had already started their second peel when Countess Roza and her son walked out from the shade of the north-west tower of the castle of Denestornya and started the short descent which led to the village church. As long as Balint could remember the bells that signalled the time for going to church had always sounded the same. It was that same sound that pealed forth when he had been a child, a schoolboy home from the holidays from the Theresianum, or a young man on leave from his diplomatic posts abroad.

This weekly attendance at church had become something of a pilgrimage for Countess Roza. She too remembered the familiar sound of the bells from her own childhood when, the spoilt princess of an enchanted domain, she had demurely walked down the same path firstly with her parents, later with her husband, and then for so many widowed years, alone or just with a servant in attendance. And it had been just the same for generations of Abadys before her. The path was paved with ancient pebbles. Every now and then there was a short flight of stone steps, and these were now deeply worn even though it was only folk from the castle who used the path which led to the small door of the cemetery. This was always kept locked, and only they had the key.

The family never drove to church, no matter how bad the weather. This would have meant a long detour from the castle courtyard, through the home farm and back through the village until eventually they reached the rococo gateway where stood three graceful statues of angels, one holding the Ten Commandments, the second the Abady coat of arms, and the third leaning elegantly on a long trumpet patiently awaiting the order to sound the Last Trump.

Anyhow, whatever the reason, Countess Abady, who was determined that all the members of her household should also attend church on Sunday, never ordered the carriage on this day.

Abady stopped for a moment on the edge of the narrow path. He loved to look out from there. Though the gentle hillside was covered with a thick plantation of young pine trees, from this place there was a gap through which one could look out over the rich Keresztes plains towards the distant Torda mountains. Even further off could just be seen the hazy blue outlines of the high ridges of the Jara, while close at hand the sunlight picked out the stone fáade of the old church. Just behind it, half hidden by groups of lime trees and elms, Balint could see the red roofs of the old mansion where his grandfather, Count Peter, had lived; and it was the memories that were brought back by this glimpse that had such an effect today on Balint’s imagination.

As a boy Balint had often escaped from his tutors and stolen over to visit his grandfather. At that time the pines had still been quite small and Balint would pick his way through their thickly enlaced branches pretending that he was Cooper’s ‘Leather Jerkin’. When he climbed the cemetery wall he would imagine it to be the palisades of a great fort. By the time he had also scaled the wall of his grandfather’s mansion he was often in a thoroughly bedraggled state with torn trousers and filthy stockings. Thinking about it today he could still see the old gentleman, himself the soul of neatness, with a smile on his carefully shaven face and his small pointed moustaches waxed to a fine point, turning in welcome as Balint climbed wearily up to the porticoed terrace.

After Count Peter’s death Balint’s mother had allowed her agent Azbej to install himself in a few of the rooms and Balint managed to avoid going there as he did not wish to be angered by whatever horrors the common little lawyer might have perpetrated. Perhaps he had even repainted some of the eighteenth-century rooms in garish colours, and Balint did not want to be pained by the sacrilege to his grandfather’s memory.

Recollecting himself he hurried after his mother who was now some way ahead.

The church gave the impression of being completely white, both inside and out. The interior walls had been lime-washed and even the ancient benches were as white as constant scrubbing for several centuries could achieve. The floor was covered with great slabs of white limestone. The organ was painted pale grey with its elaborate decorations picked out in faded gilt and the baldachino and the pulpit were of pale carved stone. The ceiling too was painted, each square panel with a different pattern of either flowers or heraldic emblems. These, however, were all so faded that the general impression was one of radiant whiteness, so much so that one hardly noticed that on the ceiling there were tulips and carnations and that here a white hart was drinking from a colourless mountain stream and there an oddly-shaped pelican was feeding its young with its own blood.

In the congregation many of the men seemed to be dressed in white too, so snowy were their best linen shirts. Contrasted with them were the principal men of the village — the estate manager, the local sheriff and leading tradespeople and the treasurer of Balint’s new co-operative society. These people, all in dark clothes, sat in the front rows. Black predominated also in the women’s pews for though some of the young women and girls wore multi-coloured head-scarves the older ones who sat in front of them were swathed in black from head to foot. High on the wall behind the choir rail was the tablet showing the numbers of the hymns and psalms to be sung, and this too was painted black. However the most sombre of them all was the priest himself whose voluminous robes were of the darkest hue imaginable, and the old priest himself, as he leaned forward — with his long beak of a nose — over the edge of the pulpit, resembled nothing as much as an old crow in a tree.